MIAMI – Pro-choice activists in Florida, where nearly all abortions are banned after the 15th week of pregnancy, are asking voters to enshrine the right to a termination in the state constitution via a referendum on next year’s election ballot.
On Friday, activists and volunteers officially stopped gathering, leaving plenty of time to make the deadline and ended up earning double the number of signatures they needed to be verified to put abortion rights on the Florida ballot.
The organization is required to submit the necessary number of signatures by February 1, 2024. Collecting this many signatures so quickly has indicated strong support for the measure.
“Anecdotally we were blown away,” said Anna Hochkammer, of Florida’s Women Freedom Coalition. “We never expected to get a quarter million volunteer petitions.”
“The grassroots desire to see this on the ballot and let Floridians have their say on access to abortion has been underestimated across the board,” she added.
More than 150,000 registered Republican voters in Florida have now signed a petition calling for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion up to the point of a fetus’s viability, which is generally considered to be around the 24th week of pregnancy.
The ballot question is not support for abortion but against government interference.
“Most conservative and middle-of-the-roaders who support this support it because it is a complicated issue and say it might be ethically fraught, but they don’t think it’s an area where the government should be taking a role,” said Hochkammer.
Recent Gallup polls show just 24% of Republicans believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, and a 2014 Pew Research survey in Florida found 29% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is currently the biggest obstacle to the Florida effort after she asked the Supreme Court to reject the abortion initiative is asking the court to reject the abortion initiative that will allow abortion advocates to try to broaden the amendment’s meaning in the future.
“It’s a referendum literally on government interference with abortion.,” said Hochkammer.
Florida currently has a law in effect banning abortions after 15 weeks. However, the Florida Supreme Court is currently deciding whether that law violates Florida’s Constitution regarding a right to privacy. Should the court’s ruling favor the amendment, that would trigger an even stricter abortion ban to go into effect — a six-week abortion ban, which was passed earlier this year.